This remarkable book, bringing together memoir, travel writing, how-to manual and informal anthropology, largely unfolds in Anissari, a village in western Crete. Devastated by the death of his mother, MacLean fled there with little relevant experience and only limited, "lunatic" Greek, to build a plane on the island of Daedalus and Icarus, and fly it himself – thereby, he explains, remaking and freeing himself, and reconnecting with the ancient and divine. The process of assembling the plane is recounted in detail, giving the book an unusual combination of technical nitty-gritty and ideas of transcendence that recalls the 70s bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But it's also been rightly acclaimed as a travel writing classic; Jan Morris and Colin Thubron are among MacLean's admirers, and Robert Macfarlane's insightful introduction to this reissue places the book in a tradition stretching from Marco Polo to Bruce Chatwin, of unreliably recalled "wonder-voyages" in which "the actual and the miraculous rub shoulders".